The post was written by Oliver Schreiber, Director Global Business Unit Outsourcing & Services at itelligence AG

I want to share some thoughts and impressions from SAPPHIRE NOW 2011 at Madrid, which in my opinion was a very important and successful one. For me it was a landmark in the communication AND delivery of innovations and technologies by SAP for the last years. I had experienced SAP with a very clear and comprehensive vision and story, perfectly told and explained by Vishal Sikka’s keynote and a very accessible presentation of all major innovations and new technologies and solutions which are now delivered. Customers and partners got a very comprehensive and deep insight by the combination of SAPPHIRE NOW with TechEd, which I feel is a very useful and reasonable couple: business and technology as the two sides of the medal of innovation.

The SAP core is back on stage! – as the important base to innovate further with the available technologies for in-memory, cloud computing and mobile solutions

SAP customers and also we, as partners, were very pleased to hear about one very strong and important message — the new technologies are delivered in an undisruptive way to leverage the existing investments in the core and enhance the abilities of customers and their keyusers to innovate themselves together with their close partners in the ecosystem.

By simplifiying the technical base of applications with HANA, cloud computing technology and giving the users the freedom of access from anywhere in real-time, we will be able to rethink and innovate business processes and models. With the stability and security of the core in the back and the current enhanced general maintenance till 2020, we should be able to free up resources for renovating the technical base for future development of the processes and services using HANA, cloud computing, mobility solutions as technical enabler.

On-demand business scenarios will be further pushed by better support and integration of technologies

SAP and VM-Ware enhance their cooperation in support and better integration also in Solution Manager. That means: A much better integration of our tool infrastructure for the operation of our it.service cloud for SAP solutions. Very valuable to further automate operation and bring down TCO will be the new Landscape Virtualization Management, where we should go ahead and setup a pilot to test it. Midterm, I would expect from SAP to deliver these kind of solutions also within the scope of Solution Manager to optimize TCO also here.

Simplification of usage and operation will free up content and extend the reach of users

Of course it is still a way to go till the broad usage of HANA, below all our critical NetWeaver based solutions and will take the next two to three years, but the direction is clear and the first successes are impressive. Some may say that the massive acceleration of a CO-PA reporting is impressive, but does not argue the investment in HANA. Since the valuation of available real-time information for business decisions is difficult to count in Euros, the impact on businesses who can reduce their time to react on demands in retail or replenishment of stocks or react on competitive movements and much more: HANA could make the difference in competition and value the acceleration of access to relevant information.

Future plans for HANA Ramp-up project at itelligence

So I hope to start our first HANA Ramp-up project with one of our most important and critical clients next week to implement and optimize two very large BI solutions on HANA and then replace in the next months the Oracle DB with HANA. Hopefully, this will not only be a very impressive acceleration of access to data and help reducing storage and operation cost, but will help to be quicker in replenishing their shops based on realtime access to sales data.

Important milestone with pure HANA below BI

I’m now very optimistic with this important milestone of the release of BI 7.3 for HANA only, really replacing the “old” DB, that we will see a tremendous development of those projects in 2012 already. And we will be able to significantly improve the usage of mass data for our clients in parallel with lowering TCO.

We are prepared to design the concepts and do the implementation with our clients and also for the secure operation of HANA in our datacenters for an undisruptive usage. We will now offer HANA operation services to give our clients a secure and easy entry to this tremendous innovation.

To quote Red Bull: “the race is open now!” And it will be a long-term race to get the Number 1 in DB business like already to be seen on Vishal’s new cap.

To summarize, with the many exciting and interesting discussions with our customers and prospects and this very good outlook and overview, it was very valuable for me to be at SAPPHIRE 2011 and I’m driving home with many ideas and large expectations for 2012 and beyond.